There are over 300 miles of sewer lines in the canyons of
San Diego. As can be expected, these sewers and manholes can get overloaded or
break, spilling millions of gallons of untreated sewage and the contents of
your toilet into the ocean and canyons. Only a few years ago, the EPA ranked
San Diego in the worst quartile in terms of sewage spills. Thus, the San Diego
Oceans Foundations works with the public to raise awareness and recruit
volunteers to patrol the canyons and
monitor the status of manholes and the sewage system. And so today, we drove out
to Tecolote to clean up the canyon and inspect the manholes. The area we hiked
was extremely wild and not charted (at times the trail simply disappeared). At
one point, we ended up on the highway:

However, we did manage to find 16 manholes, one of which we reported
as broken. We also collected several full garbage bags of plastic and glass along (and off) the trail.

We also stumbled upon an unexpected find…..golf balls. They
were buried in the soil and embedded in the walls of the river. By the end of
the day, we’d dug out hundreds and hundreds of golf balls. Lugging the bags back to
the car was no small task, but we managed it and now have an impressive collection of golf
balls weighing more than many of our volunteers.

In the evening, we went to Old Town to have dinner. It was a
very festive atmosphere with open markets and colorful colonial and Hispanic decorations.

The Duke-Villanova game happened to be on TV while we ate our tacos…..its
result made me quite sad and robbed our group of free churros (our waitress promised us all free dessert if Duke won). Next year……

Tomorrow, we will be working with the Audubon Society to
restore bird habitats. Should be really fun, and we’ll definitely get to see
wildlife this time!